Open All The Way

I’m a bit behind in my news, so I just caught the story about Neuros opening up the firmware to it’s audio player. As for the “Is this a good idea or a mere publicity stunt?” part, it really depends on what people do with it. Folks have been talking about using attention metadata to help find and organize information when it’s too much to consume directly. Audio is one of those places where that attention metadata would really help out, cause it’s harder to “scan” that information manually. Yada yada yada, we in Silicon Valley have been hearing these arguments for a while so I’m not going to rehash them. But the problem was always that getting the tools to support attention information was a prohibitive. Audio players usually consisted of closed applications and proprietary platforms. Well, attention folks, if you’re really serious here’s your chance. Want a social recommendation system instead of a mass pattern matching database? This is how to get the info back out of the endpoint.